Charlie Davis and the Man Who Lived Forever
by bisexualcharliedavis
Summary: Whumptober Day 15: Pinned Down. Charlie, Lucien and Edward are pinned down in the tunnels under Tyneman. Charlie has some time to think. 4th installment of Charlie Davis and the Big Sleep (a Fallout AU).


A/N: Another installment of both whumptober AND Charlie Davis and the Big Sleep. Kill two birds with one stone, u know? Warnings for: minor character death, fighting, questionable science and all the things usually associated with the fallout franchise. Also some Blake/Jean mentioned only. Let me know what you think :-)

If you had asked Charlie Davis in 2077 if he thought he would be hiding out in the bomb shelter tunnels underneath the Tyneman house two hundred years after the end of the world as they knew it, he'd have told you to stop drinking.

If you told him that he'd be there with Lucien Blake and Edward Tyneman, he'd have told you to stop doing drugs.

Seemed to be how his life was going lately. Strange.

"I think we're going to be here for a while," Blake said and lowered himself to sit on the ground, stretching his legs out in front of him. Charlie was seated with his legs drawn close, the bottoms of his feet flat on the cement floor. He had one arm wrapped tightly around his knees, the other sitting on top of Edward Tyneman.

Well, his head jar to be more specific. The Tynemans were ahead of the game in terms of living for a long fucking time. And right now, he felt every single one of his two hundred and thirty years.

"Who's fighting?" Edward asked him, ignoring Blake entirely. Charlie had little love in his heart for Tyneman (the man and the city) as it was, but this whole situation was weighing on him.

"Children of Atom, and The Brotherhood," Blake replied, ignoring Edward's rudeness.

"The Children are around here?" He asked, sounding surprised. He supposed ruling his city from inside a room that allowed like three people inside of it was not a great way to get information filtered to you, but he had no idea that the Children of Atom were sniffing around here? Damn. The children had been a thorn in his side, but this was the first time that they'd made any concentrated effort to attack a settlement.

"They've been around here for like three months you…" Charlie couldn't come up with a good jar related insult. Though it wasn't really a jar, it was more like a big tube, with a lit base, and the bottom of Edward's neck resting on it. Charlie didn't know much about how it worked, but he suspected that there were tubes that he couldn't see going up his throat from the bottom. He also had (apparently) not aged since the last time Charlie saw him before he died in 2076. "Jar head."

"Truly biting," Edward said, rolling his eyes. He was sitting in liquid, though it was too thick to be water. He could blink, and move his eyes but do extremely little else. Including defend himself from the assholes who joined the Brotherhood, and the crazy bastards who joined the Children. Now it was Blake's turn to roll his fully white eyes, even in the dim light given off by Edward's jar, they stood in jarring comparison to his brown, rotten skin. If he was rolling them at him, or Edward, Charlie couldn't tell.

"Do you think we can sneak past them?" Charlie asked, trying his best to remember if Blake was especially noted for being sneaky. Nothing jumps to the forefront of his mind, but that doesn't mean anything. He'd been forgetting, or...Misplacing a lot of memories lately. Much like faces, so many of the specifics of the past were becoming, or already lost to him.

He turned to look at Edward. He knew it was Edward, because he recognized the voice, and Blake had confirmed it for him. And there was no reason for Blake to lie to him. He could, but what would he gain from the action? He was a friend. Friends don't lie to each other. Theoretically, he knew what Edward's face was like, but in practice...He just looked like any other head in a jar. Or, what Charlie thought a head in a jar might look like. He'd never been one for science fiction.

"Not unless you have a steady supply of Stealthboys in the pockets of that jumpsuit of yours." Charlie looked down at his blue vault issue suit. It was usually the first thing people noticed about him, followed by the Pipboy in a close second. He wasn't even wearing the sleeves, just had them tied around his waist and still, people felt compelled to comment on it. Honestly, he sometimes felt like he understood what Mattie meant about people seeing her skirts before seeing her.

Now there was someone he hadn't thought of in a while. Mattie O'Brien. Last he'd heard from her, things were pretty dire over in the Motherland, but she was holding out. She was probably dead. She was probably shot for being a communist, long before the bombs dropped. Admittedly, he'd fallen lax in his communication with her, focusing mostly on his own family. His eyebrows gathered of their own accord, pulling on his still healing bullet wound, as he thought of his family.

He'd looked for them, with Jean. She knew everyone in Bad Luck City and had never once seen a Davis. She went with him, all the way to Melbourne, all the way to the house, where Bernie's makeshift bomb shelter still stood, sheltering five skeletons. Some he could identify. His littlest brother was still a kid, his skeleton was small. Ray had grabbed their father's boxing gloves. His mother was there, Jean said she could tell because of the pubic bones, something the Doc taught her a lifetime ago. The twins, holding each other in death. Of the five Davis boys, he was the only one left. And Bernie wasn't there. When he tuned in with his pipboy, he found a distress signal from the shelter.

'Charlie, sweetheart, I hope you made it to that shelter in Ballarat. I'm so proud to have been your mum. I hope I'll see you again someday. This message will repeat in five, four, three, two, one. Charlie, sweetheart, I hope you made it to that shelter in Ballarat. I'm so proud to have been your mother. I hope I'll see you again someday. This message will repeat in five -"

Ad nauseam.

For 200 years, his mother had been saying she loved him. He felt a wave of hatred for Edward wash over him, cold and stinging. How could he live for 200 years and hate ghouls? Ghouls were the people that they used to know. Ghouls were banned in Tyneman, had been for the past few decades. Jean helped establish the town, with Mrs. Tyneman and this was the thanks she got? Being cast aside when some arbitrary rule was put in place about what was and was not a monster?

He, Jean and Edward had all been alive for the same amount of time. Jean had helped establish two different towns, made herself a tailor shop, cared for the people they used to know as they died from radiation poisoning, all the while not knowing if she would ever see her husband again. All the while nursing a broken heart.

Charlie was the first to admit that he sometimes didn't handle things with the grace and love Jean did. He was much handier with a gun than a pen, and killing raiders was a favourite past time of his, but he was a hard worker. He worked for the farms that they'd been establishing, he worked in her store; putting ballistic weave into unassuming clothing, he worked at making Bad Luck City a better place to live.

Edward lived in an Ivory Tower, blissfully unaware of the wars taking place under his windowsill, kept secret from everyone and everything by his mother, interacting with only the unfortunate maids tasked with keeping his machines working.

"Charlie?"

"Huh?" He asked, looking up. Blake was looking at him, his face was drawn up in concern. Charlie could tell that much, and what he couldn't see, he could hear.

"We'll get out of this." He said, kindly.

"I wish I'd left you there to die." He told Edward.

"Then why didn't you?" He spat back. Charlie didn't know why. Probably the same reason he didn't kill Danny, even though he could have spared himself a lot of trouble. Or taken revenge on the remaining Vault-Tec Tech's he'd met at Bad Luck City. The same reason he'd probably let Bernie go if he ever saw him again.

He couldn't justify killing people just because he didn't like them. Killing a raider was easy because they were a direct threat to what remained of his family, but killing someone just because he didn't like them? He couldn't abide by that.

He hadn't intended to stop off in Tyneman. He hadn't been there since the first time just after he woke up. But apparently, the guards were on the lookout for 'the fucker with the Pipboy and a vault suit.'

"Management wants to talk to you." They'd said, and Charlie had said he wasn't going anywhere without his friend, Ghoul bans be damned. He'd thought that would be the end of it and they'd leave him alone. He was very surprised, almost as surprised as Blake when they were both let in.

They'd been led into the main building, what remained of the Tyneman house. Everything was so clean in Tyneman. Bad Luck City was decrepit by comparison. Him and Blake had been walking for a few hours already, he felt bad for walking around, like he was dirtying the place up just by existing.

He didn't know who he thought was running Tyneman, this mysterious Management.

The absolute last thing he'd expected what to see a head in a jar on a stand. Behind him, Blake gasped audibly.

"Charles." The head had said to him, "I expected you to be...Less fresh."

"It's my new skincare routine." He'd replied, "Being cryogenically frozen against my will." Blink, blink from the head,

"Vault-Tec, mad bastards."

"Look, I'm face blind, so you're gonna have to tell me who you are." He said, impatiently. He wanted to get Blake back to Bad Luck City, back to Jean. The three days he'd spent confined to bed at Blake's surgery at Good Faith was too long by him.

"Edward, Edward Tyneman." He turned to Blake.

"Is he telling the truth?"

"He certainly is."

"What do you want?"

"You're not even going to ask about the tank?"

So he'd asked about the tank, gotten his science fiction answer, asked why his old man wasn't in the tank, got told his mother didn't love him enough and asked what happened to his old lady and was told she didn't want to live forever. Honestly, he barely cared. He wanted to leave.

"I wanted to talk to you as a representative of Bad Luck City."

"I'm not into politics."

"Hard to believe, since you started showing up Bad Luck City's associate farms have doubled, meaning that its power has doubled."

"Turns out, " He'd said, "That if you treat people with respect and give them help they can count on; they're willing to form a united front."

Before Edward could talk next, the window by his head had shattered, cutting his exposed skin. He looked out to see the clean streets being painted red by The Brotherhood, who he knew Tyneman had an alliance of sorts with, and the Children of Atom.

He'd grabbed Edward, and they'd escaped into the old bomb shelter. The power was turned off to make sure that there was no excessive drain on Edward's charging stand. If they made it out of this alive, Jean was going to be fascinated.

He wiped his nose on the palm of his hand, before shifting to the other side of the room. Maybe he was weak, but he ended up sitting by Blake's side, and when he reached out one hand to pull him closer, he didn't pull away. Just pressed his head against Blake's shoulder, and listened to the sound of his rattling breath. He was assaulted by visions of sitting in the lift to the vault. One day, he would like to hug Blake when no one's life is on the line, or he wasn't seeking refuge from a war.

Above them, the fight raged on. Like it always was.


End file.
